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ANTANAS GUOGA

LITHUANIA

THE POKER POLITICIAN

Luke Waller

Antanas “Tony” Guoga never meant to be an MEP. In 1984, as an 11-year-old refugee from Soviet Lithuania, he packed his Rubik’s Cube (he was reigning national champion) and headed to Melbourne, Australia. By the turn of the century he’d become a freewheeling globetrotter known as “Tony G,” the Aussie bad boy of international poker.

Guoga was a cable TV star, a multimillionaire, and on the way to building his own online gambling empire TonyBet. (His four-star Tony Resort and marriage to model Aistę Šlapokaitę would come later). But in re-laying roots in his native Lithuania, Guoga saw a political system sadly lacking business nous. Struggling with a 20 percent drop in GDP in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Lithuania’s population was draining away, led by a political class that hadn’t escaped its Soviet past. Guoga saw complacency where others saw Lithuania gaining from EU subsidies and market access. Guoga used his wealth to launch himself as a competent populist, intent on telling Lithuanians and officials in Brussels all the things others couldn’t afford to tell them.

To get there he drove 42,000 kilometers (Lithuania has only 13,000 kilometers of paved roads) and recruited 2,000 volunteers. Since winning election to the European Parliament in 2014, he still gives his MEP salary to charity.

His unsexy mission is structural economic reform. “One percent growth is not OK, the country will be deleted. Lithuania made cuts but didn’t make the reforms Estonia did. We need to restart the computer on a fresh operating platform. If we want to catch up to Germany it means we have to be better than Germany.”

Tony Guoga is already a hero to many Lithuanians, but in 2015 he took that status cross-border. He gave voice to the frustration of fed-up Balts, and eastern Europeans across the board, in a rap song that slammed Greeks for wanting subsidies and loans from much poorer EU states.

Politics is just a new game of poker, he says. “I know how much money to put into something, how to model possible outcomes of events, manage risk. Poker is about understanding what hand others have and what people are thinking about you,” and taking responsibility.

“In bureaucracy there is no responsibility.”

Your advertising slogan for Europe. Don’t talk — just do it!

Which historical figure do you most admire?Confucius.

Would you take a refugee into your own home?I already have said for the national (Lithuanian) media at the beginning of the discussions regarding the quotas — if my country cannot take 200 refugees I will take them into my resort.